Does Wall Street really own America’s Healthcare system?

I was listening to NPR  and reading on the comments about the healthcare crisis in America being all the insurance companies fault. I was motivated to comment about this issue seeing as how it is near and dear to my livelyhood. There is a fundimental misunderstanding about what health insurance is. Health Insurance is NOT setting the prices we pay for health care. Take a second for that to sink in. Instead, health insurance is the financing the expense of healthcare. Doctors, hospitals, and other medical providers set their own prices. I recently wrote a comment on the NPR website, let me share my post here:

Does Wall Street really own America’s Healthcare system? Neither Wall Street as an abstract, nor an insurance company in particular sets the prices doctors and hospitals charge for the care they provide. 

 

All the insurance companies are trying to do is negotiate those prices down for their members by using their buying power as leverage, and finance the cost of American’s healthcare over time.

 

People pay a premium to finance things. We pay interest on a home mortgage or an auto loan. The same is true with financing healthcare with health insurance. That is the business Wall Street and insurance companies are in.

 

Individual patients are welcome to go uninsured and pay cash for their healthcare thereby cutting Wall Street and the health insurance companies out of the equation completely. But who can afford that? The real costs are still the medical services, not the financing of those services.

 

Should only individual doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers be able to charge for their services? Hospitals, insurance companies, and the like should have to work for free? That sounds a little greedy and naïve to me.

You can use this link to read the entire article (and the comments) that got me going on this. I hope it sheds some light on the current healthcare crisis and the health insurance companies role in it.